That gregarious, animal-like existence with its gross amusements, and the inevitable influence of the evil on the good, has long been acknowledged to affect the morals of the criminal in the most corrupt fashion. It slowly forces him to lose the habits of domesticity, those very qualities which must be preserved above all by a convict who on his release from prison becomes a self-sufficient member of a colony, where from the very first day he is obliged by law and under threat of punishment to become a good house- holder and a good family man.
These communal wards are places where slander, mur- der, informing on prisoners and peculation are tolerated and excused. Kulachestvo [peculation by rich peasants] is the term employed to describe the phenomenon of the maidan,2 which was introduced to Sakhalin from Siberia. A prisoner who possesses and loves money and has been con- victed because he loves it too much, being a rich peasant, a miscr and a swindler, arranges to pay his fellow convicts for a monopoly on supplying provisions to the prisoners, and if the prison is large and well populated, the profits can be on the order of several hundred rubles a year.
The man who owns the maidan is officially called the parashechnik [parashka = chamber pot], since he takes upon himself the duty of emptying the chamber pots, if any, and keeping the place clean. On his plank bed there can usually be found a small trunk about 1 arshins [42 inches] square, either green or brown; near it and under it are displayed small pieces of sugar, small loaves of white bread about the size of a fist, cigarettes, bottles of milk, and other products wrapped in paper and dirty rags.3
Concealed behind these humble pieces of sugar and loaves of white bread is an evil which exerts its influence far beyond the limits of the prison. The maidan is a gam- bling house, a tiny Monte Carlo, which engenders in the prisoners a contagious passion for faro and other gambling games. The maidan and the card players employ the willing services of brutal and implacable pawnbrokers. Prison pawnbrokers demand 10 percent interest per day and even per hour; if a pawn ticket is not redeemed in a day, the property becomes the possession of the pawnbroker. After completing their terms, the maidanshchiks and the pawn- brokers are assigned to settlements, where they continue their profitable activities, and it is no wonder that there are settlers on Sakhalin who have had 56,000 rubles stolen from them.
In the summer of 1890, during my sojourn on Sakhalin,
60
there were some 2,000 convicts in the Alexandrovsk prison, only 900 of whom lived in the prison. Here are some chance figures: on May 3, 1890, at the beginning of the summer, 1,279 prisoners were being fed and housed in the prison; on September 29, at the end of the summer, there were only 675 prisoners.
As to the work done by the prisoners in Alexandrovsk, this was observed to consist of building and various public works: new houses were put up, others were altered, and they maintained the streets and public squares. Carpentry was considered the most difficult work. A prisoner who had been a carpenter in his homeland really suffers here, and in this respect he is far worse off than a painter or a roofer. The difficulty does not lie with carpentering so much as in the fact that every piece of lumber must be hauled out of the forest by the carpenter himself.
At the present time the logging area is about five miles from the post. During thc summer the people are harnessed to logs by chains and they have to haul thcse logs, which arc a foot wide and several fect long, and it is horrible to watch; thcir faces become contorted, and this is especially truc of natives of the Caucasus. It is said that in winter their hands and fect arc frozen stiff, and some freeze to dcath before they have accomplished thc grueling task of hauling the logs to the post.
Carpentry also presents difficulties to the administration because there arc very few people available on Sakhalin for systcmatic hard labor, and there is always an insufficient supply of labor, although there are thousands of convicts. General Kononovich told me that it is very difficult to undertake new construction and to erect new buildings. There are just not enough people. If there are enough carpenters, there are not enough people to haul the logs. If they send people out for logs, there are not enough car- penters. The woodmen who cut wood every day, stack it and light the stoves before dawn when everyone is still asleep, also have to work excessively hard.
In order to judge the intensity of the labor and its diffi- culty, it is necessary to consider not only the physical effort expended, but also the working conditions and the charac- ter of the work as it arises from these conditions. The extreme cold in the winter and the humidity at Alexan- drovsk—and it is humid throughout the year—place the worker in a very nearly unbearable position. A woodcutter in Russia experiences nothing like this.
The law prescribes "working conditions" for convicts similar co those of an ordinary farm or factory worker.4 It permits the burden to be eased in various ways for con- victs who have reformed. Practice, however, does not always conform to the law, especially in view of local conditions and the peculiarities of the work. You cannot determine how many hours a convicc musc haul logs during a snow- storm, you cannot release him from night work when he is indispensable, you cannot excuse a reformed prisoner from working on a holiday if he is working in a coal pit with a probationer, because chen it would be necessary tO excuse both of them and stop the work.
As a result of the incompetent, stupid and coarse people placed in charge of these projects, much more effon is expended than is necessary. For example, the loading and unloading of ships, which does not require exceptional physical strengch on the parc of laborers in Russia, is vir- wally a form of martyrdom for the people in Alexandrovsk. There is no specially trained force to work on ships. Every time new people are taken for the job, and as a result there is often terrible confusion in a heavy sea. On the ships the convicts lose their tempers and break out in wild curses, and all the time the barges bump against the ship's sides, and the people stand or lie down, their faces green and distorted. They are all seasick, and meanwhile the oars they have relinquished are floating around the barges. For this reason the work takes a long cime, much time is losc and the people suffer unnecessarily. One day during the unload- ing of a ship I heard a prison overseer say, "My people have not eaten all day."
Much convict labor is expended on required work in prisons. Daily work is done by cooks, bakers, tailors, shoe- makers, water carriers, floor scrubbers, orderlies, herdsmen, etc. The military, telegraph and geodetic offices also use convict labor. Some fifty persons have been commandeered for the prison infirmary, but it is uncertain in what capacity and for what reason. I do not know how many are used as servants by the officials.
As far as I was able ro discover, every official, even those who are only office workers, can obtain an unlimited number of servants. The docror with whom I was quar- tered lived alone with his son; he had a chef, a yard man, a cook and a chambermaid. This is extremely luxurious for a junior prison docror. One prison warden had eight serv- ants on his staff: a seamstress, a shoemaker, a chambermaid, a footman who delivered messages, a children's nurse, a laundress, a chef and a scrubwoman. The problem of serv- ants on Sakhalin is an offensive and grievous one. It is prob- ably the same wherever there is penal servitude, and it is not new. In "A Short Description of the Disorganization Existing in Penal Servitude," Vlasov describes how when he arrived on the island in i 87i he "was astounded above all by the fact that, with the permission of the former Governor-General, convicts were being used as servants for the commandant and the officers." In his words, women were assigned as servants to members of the administration, not even excluding bachelor guards.